All Keyed Up

By C.J. Hirschfield

“I’m a sane person,” Lela McKenna assures me. “I just have a singular obsession with Fairyland’s Magic Key.”

No kidding.

Lela – one of Fairyland’s most active volunteers – still has her very first key, which she believes she acquired in 1968. “It’s yellow, and it has the original tag,” she says.

Children’s Fairyland’s iconic Magic Key made its debut a decade earlier, in 1958. It unlocks the many storybook boxes in our park, releasing musical stories tied to our fanciful sets. For generations of Bay Area kids, the Magic Key has represented positive memories of time spent with loved ones in our little urban oasis.

Lela McKenna, volunteer extraordinaire.

And yes, a key purchased in the 1950s will still work in our boxes. I tell people, only half kidding, that if the keys no longer worked I’d be run out of town.

I also tell people that one test of a true native Oaklander is that he or she can recall the color of their first Fairyland Magic Key. What’s more, they, their parents or their grandparents still have that key in some drawer in the family home.

Fairyland purchases the keys in batches of 10,000, and we change the colors each time we reorder.

Lela says she didn’t become a hardcore collector until she began volunteering at Fairyland six years ago, helping out at our summer family sleepovers and at Jack o’Lantern Jamboree. She currently has “about 48” keys, which she has mounted in a display case.

Lela's Magic Key collection.

Lela has discovered that she’s not alone in her quest. She and two other collectors call themselves the Key Club; they know which colors each of the others is lacking, and they trade keys and keep each other informed about keys that periodically turn up on eBay. At Fairyland we sell the keys for $3; on eBay they can go for as much as $30.

Club members have coined their own descriptive names for key colors: Kraft Mac and Cheese, Caltrans Orange, Goofy Grape, Cherry Jell-O. “Muddy Teal” and “Slate Gray” are the colors that Lela most covets.

In addition to her collection, Lela has a tattoo of the Magic Key on her wrist. It’s not just that it evokes happy memories of a special place that lets kids use their imaginations instead of screens, she tells me. It’s also practical: When she visits a flea market to search for keys, Lela can easily show people what she’s looking for by flashing her arm. “And when I’m bored, I fill in the image with a colored Sharpie,” she says.

Lela's Magic Key tattoo.

When Lela says she has 48 keys, she means 48 keys representing 48 colors. But she has many more of one particular type: the glow-in-the-dark key we featured as a special offering a couple of years ago. Lela bought “well over a hundred” and placed them in empty candle jars all around her bedroom.  

“You can see my room from space,” says the undisputed Key Queen of Fairyland.

Editor's note: Want to volunteer at Fairyland? Sign up here!

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C.J. Hirschfield  has served for 15 years as executive director of Children's Fairyland, where she is charged with the overall operation of the nation's first storybook theme park.